Review round-up: fantasy and sci-fi

Speculative fiction I'd like to recommend

Over the 15 years I had my Wordpress blog I wrote a fair few book reviews, most of which I’ve imported into my Substack archive, and I also reviewed for The Bookbag. Chances are you won’t have read them, and even if you did you may be in the mood now for a book you didn’t fancy then so I thought I’d collect a few together, with supplementary recommendations. I started with crime and thrillers set in the real world and followed up with some that weren’t, and then some assorted fiction, and books about nature and the world around us. Now it’s the turn of science fiction and fantasy.

An awful lot of my reviews have been in this sphere, I first got given free books in return for a review for SFReader in 2009 and I had a column called A Random Walk Through Speculative Fiction at the Luna Station Quarterly website for a while. So this is probably going to have to be the most — how many subscribers will I lose if I use the word ‘curated’? — let’s say the most selective of these review round-ups. If it’s too long for your email, you might need to read it in a web browser, and if you make it to the end there’s a timeslip radio drama I wrote, which was a winner in the Script Yorkshire radio drama competition 2020.

Why do I always have to start in Yorkshire?

I pointed out the cyberpunk police procedural set in West Yorkshire, Airedale by Dylan Byford, in the SF crime reviews. This time then I’ll highlight the 2004 fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which I reviewed in 2013.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Mr Norrell is a grumpy old magician from Yorkshire, which is partly what made me read the book. It’s set in the early years of the 19th century and written in the style of a popular novel of that time, complete with long-winded gossipy asides, which I simultaneously loved and got frustrated with:

the stakes are lives and kingdoms and ways of life, not who will marry whom and when. While it was amusing to read of magic in England in such a commonplace manner… ultimately I found it was too laid-back a style for what was happening.

I did really enjoy the novel, but I found it a slog to read and I hesitated to recommend it because I knew so many people wouldn’t get on with that style of writing. Still, I think if you haven’t come across it and you feel like you can deal with a thousand pages of genteel discourse on the fate of kingdoms, it’s worth a go. Or if you can get hold of the BBC TV adaptation, you get it at a faster pace as a costume drama¹.

Everywhere in every universe that isn’t Yorkshire

I’m not going to wade into the genre-name debate. I use SFF and speculative fiction interchangeably. I call all sorts of books ‘sci-fi’ on the grounds that when I was a child, or when my 1960s paperback edition came out, that’s what everyone called it. I’m not about to label something sword and sorcery here only to discover that ‘technically’ it’s high fantasy or dragonlore, or epic space opera with a Tolkien twist². So, what follows is not going to be a neat subdivision by subgenre. Suffice to say, if you hang around the shelves in your local bookshop that might contain Asimov, PKD, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker or the Doctor Who spin-off novels, then some of these book recommendations might be your kind of thing.

Neil Gaiman

I finally read American Gods in 2013 around the time The Ocean at the End of the Lane came out, having enjoyed some of Neil Gaiman’s novels already: Stardust, but particularly Anansi Boys and the Terry Pratchett collaboration, Good Omens.

American Gods was one of those total immersion novels where you completely believe in the world that’s created. And belief, when it comes down to it, is what the book is all about.

Shadow is in his early thirties, he’s about to be released early from prison and he’s looking forward to seeing his wife again. In the event, he’s released a few days earlier than he was expecting, so he can make it to her funeral in time. Three years of aching to be back with the person you love most, and she dies in a car crash before you can get to her. You’d be lost, wouldn’t you? Directionless. Ripe for being swept up into events beyond your control or comprehension. Something like, say, a war between gods.

It’s a road trip, it’s small town America, it’s mythic and epic and reverent and irreverent at the same time. It’s almost like Stephen King read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, let it stew at the back of his mind for a few years then wrote a book haunted by it. Except it’s also unmistakably Neil Gaiman. There are coin tricks and cons, magic that’s misdirection and sleight of hand, and magic that is real and a lot less showy. It’s about love, loyalty, remembering and believing – be it in religion or yourself or your family, and it’s about what happens when the world moves on.

Then in 2014 I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane which was a surprisingly short book, for modern fantasy. Or perhaps I just read it particularly fast. I seemed to be completely immersed for a brief moment, then I emerged into the sunlight again and it was all over. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. It’s closer to the spirit of American Gods than to Stardust, I would say.

It’s a novel about childhood (and myths, and books). The different priorities, different realities, of children and adults. It’s about deeper truths, small pleasures, and what happens as we grow up — or grow older, anyway. The vast majority of the book is told from a seven year old boy’s point of view, as remembered by his middle-aged self; childlike, with a grown-up veneer. It’s a dark fairytale bordering on horror story, with a wonderfully British cosiness round the edges. It’s about a little boy, befriended by the older girl down the lane who claims her family’s duckpond is an ocean.

If you’ve never read any Neil Gaiman but enjoyed John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, or even Lisey’s Story by Stephen King, give The Ocean at the End of the Lane a go. Vivid imagery and a rattling pace, with a poignant core.

Iain M Banks

I never fancied reading any of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks; I seem to recall reading one or more short stories set in the same world and not being keen. However, I have read and enjoyed two of his other novels, reviewing The Algebraist in 2010:

The book is at times genuinely funny with some characters playing off each other brilliantly, but on the whole it’s a tense and engaging novel that’s mainly quite fast-paced

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks

I thought The Algebraist might appeal to a similar audience to The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton, which I also reviewed in 2010 (you may recall I mentioned Hamilton’s Greg Mandel series in the SF crime round-up. This book is nothing like that):

The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton

In 2011 I read Feersum Endjinn, a much thinner novel than The Algebraist at only 275 pages, but Banks packed a great story in nevertheless — possibly with a few loose ends, either that or I didn’t pick up on something subtle.

Each chapter is split into 4 sections, each following one of the four main characters or small connected group of characters. One of these is Bascule, a sort of lovable rascal of a novice monk who lives in a brotherhood and communes with the dead. Or rather, their downloaded representations. My other half was put off the whole book because of the way Bascule’s first-person sections are written. They put me in mind of Whizz For Atoms and the like, by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. If you’ve ever read those you’ll have little trouble with Bascule, but as he says himself ‘I tolkd farely normil but I thot a bit funy’ so it might not be that easy to grasp straight off.

The novel has overtones of Gormenghast in places; there is a whole landscape within a huge castle, and for a while I wasn’t sure if the people were miniature or the rooms were huge. As you might expect from a contained society like that there is murder, intrigue, civil war, a possibly corrupt government and various conspiracies. Add the downloaded personalities of the dead, who live through eight lives in the speeded-up time of the cryptosphere, and you have a rich construct woven around a gripping story.

Comic fantasy

If you haven’t already read and enjoyed the Arthur Dent and Dirk Gently novels of Douglas Adams, or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, how are we even friends? Actually, friend T has been around for 35 years and I’ve never held her lack of Adams and Pratchett fandom against her, but there will forever be an unfathomable element to her soul.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a review of either a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett novel. Objectively they were both a bit hit and miss, but my god the hits were jaw-dropping. Read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams — you will either be prostrate in awe that a book can be so funny and flippant and yet so full of wonder and meaning at the same time, or you will curse me for having wasted several hours of your life. There is no middle way.

I did write a review of Terry Pratchett’s short story collection A Blink of the Screen, which I read a couple of weeks before he died in 2015. I’d recommend it if you like comic fantasy, even if you’re not a big Pratchett fan.

A Blink of the Screen, short fiction by Terry Pratchett

The Corpse-Rat King by Lee Battersby is easy-to-read comic fantasy in the Terry Pratchett/Tom Holt tradition. Marius don Hellespont is a corpse-rat, a looter of the dead on battlefields. He gets mistaken for a dead king and taken to rule the kingdom of the dead. They’ll let him go if he finds them a replacement king: cue highly entertaining quest/chase. It was Battersby’s debut, from 2012, and there is a sequel available but I haven’t read it.

Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey is technically not a comedy but does contain farce and sarcasm, and will probably appeal to Dirk Gently fans. Who also know their physics:

If 'what would happen if the wave function didn't collapse' is just a string of words to you then you might find it a bit hard going

Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey

Also not strictly a comic fantasy, but if you’re a high fantasy reader who doesn’t mind the odd Terry Pratchett or Tom Holt, you could do worse than to read Magic Kingdom For Sale – SOLD! by Terry Brooks. It was a quick and easy read, laced with humour and with a few original twists to its comfortable tale of dragons, fairy magic and quests.

Ben Holiday is a lawyer in Chicago with a successful career, millions in the bank, a flash apartment (this being the 80s, that means a lot). Trouble is, his wife died a couple of years ago, he’s staring 40 in the face, and he’s beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. The answer’s either suicide or a long break from his old life, so the advert in the Christmas catalogue offering a kingdom (complete with dragons, fairies, wizards and knights) for a million dollars seems too good to be true. And we all know what they say about things that seem too good to be true…

As I put this post together in mid-July I’m reading The Purgatory Poisoning by Rebecca Rogers, in which a man wakes up in purgatory having been murdered, and has to find out — with the help of a couple of angels, one of whom has a top pocket in his robe to hold pens — who did it. Expect a review soon.

Historical settings

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley was a wonderful blend of nineteenth-century adventure story and fantasy novel, set in (from memory) the 1860s and following a chap from Cornwall to Peru in the footsteps of his grandfather. The core of it is about collecting specimens of exotic trees, but there’s a lot about the properties of trees, and rock, and landscape, and it’s richly described — I could still picture various locations or scenes, months after reading it. I reviewed her novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street in 2017 and a character from that book also makes a cameo appearance, as it were.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

The Honours by Tim Clare is a dark fantasy, bordering on horror, set in 1935 which I read in 2015 after my dad read a review of it in The Guardian and pronounced it ‘your sort of thing’. Though the prologue makes it pretty clear the book has fantastical elements, the first half of the novel ticks along as an engaging 1930s thriller, all spies and intrigue and gathering warclouds.

The central character is 12 year old Delphine Venner, a tomboy with an obsessive interest in war and guns. Going to live on a country estate with her upper middle class parents, as part of an exclusive rest home cum improvement society, the bored and lonely little girl goes exploring, living out fantasies of Great War trenches, and suspecting every grown-up she encounters — apart from her dad — as being Up To No Good. The truth, however, is beyond even Delphine’s imagination.

As you might expect there are secret passages for Delphine to find, good places to hide, woodland to explore and large grounds for her to wander in and keep out of everyone’s way. I found her an engaging character to follow, and all the bad decisions and character flaws necessary for the plot to unfold seemed to flow naturally from her age and background. Once the fantasy plot kicks in it’s gripping, but prior to that you have to be willing to tag along as this girl imagines her way through long, lonely days, overhearing cryptic conversation snippets that neither she nor we can interpret. I suspect there will be a big overlap of readers with John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things³.

In 2011 I read The Cardinal’s Blades by Pierre Pevel: a fantasy novel translated from French, which doesn’t happen that often. It’s set in Paris in 1633, the Cardinal in question naturally being Richelieu and the Blades his finest and most elite soldier-spies, who had been disbanded 5 years earlier for political reasons. A good portion of the book is the ‘we’re putting the band back together’ section, where the Blades are located and plucked from their dayjobs, which is light and enjoyable.

Although it’s a fantasy novel, for almost the entire book except the climax it’s easy to forget that and assume you’re reading a historical swashbuckling adventure. As you might expect from the setting, it’s full of spies and double-agents, intrigue and political scheming, sword-fights and heroic rescues. And, thankfully, humour. The fantasy element arises from who some of the spies and double-agents are working for, and what additional power that might give them, though I don’t think that aspect was fully explored.

I enjoyed it, but I also enjoyed the Scarlet Pimpernel novels, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask (and of course, Dogtanian). If you don’t think they’d be your sort of thing, I wouldn’t recommend this book, but if you like high boots, doublets, rapiers and repartee, and you don’t mind the occasional dragon, I’d say you were in for a cracking read.

In 2017 I read A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab. This is the story of not just one London but four, one of them being our own eighteenth century version, which is a bit quiet on the magic front compared with the others. Kell is unusual in that he can travel in a carefully controlled way between three of the different Londons, as a kind of diplomatic courier. He’s from Red London, the one with the most fairytale kingdom feeling to it, but there’s also White London which is downright bloodthirsty and dangerous. Hang on – didn’t we say four Londons? As is the way of these things, there’s a London we don’t talk about, a London that collapsed under its own excesses so long ago it’s become a myth. Black London is real though, and it might not be as firmly sealed in the past as was generally believed.

It’s hard to say more without giving too much away, but there is a strong female character, nicely complex, and a pretty-boy prince who I found kind of irritating but since I find plenty of real people irritating that didn’t disturb me too much. There’s tension, excitement, natty dressing, and magic. Note that Schwab is American — I got jolted out of the story briefly by a confusing mention of ‘tight pants’ and then realised what she meant. Although it’s the first in a series, it didn’t feel incomplete as some fantasy series novels do, rather it felt that there was scope for further adventures if we cared to know about them. Book two is A Gathering of Shadows.

Dark Gifts from Vic James

The Dark Gifts trilogy by Vic James is set in contemporary Britain with an alternative history, where only people with magic in their blood are full citizens with acknowledged human rights. The main characters are the children of two very different families, ranging in age from ten to mid-twenties, with much of the action revolving around two boys in their late teens who end up bonded by circumstance in a fascinating way.

Britain is powered by slaves; every non-magical person must do a ten-year stretch. Meanwhile the magical aristocracy (the ‘Equals’) live on their country estates in luxury, and the country is ruled by the heads of these powerful families. A mixture of propaganda and the silence of the traumatised ensures that the wider public never hear about, or simply don’t believe, the treatment of slaves in some parts of the country. When the Hadleys opt to do their slave-days as a family, on an aristocratic estate, their belief in the basic fairness of the system and the inevitability of slavery begins to wobble. Of course, even within the Equal society, some are more equal than others, and the tensions between and within families play out on a large scale.

The first book, Gilded Cage, is very good on how ordinary people either turn a blind eye or simply miss the hints that all is not well – with busy lives and faith in basic decency they don’t want to rock the boat and they assume the nastiest rumours are trouble-causing nonsense. It also portrays complexity and grey areas well, and the way that individuals don’t necessarily align with the group you expect them to. There are some fabulous characters in the trilogy, Silyen Jardine in particular kept wrong-footing me and revealing yet another facet. Book two, Tarnished City kept the pace and tension and developed some of the characters in interesting ways, and Bright Ruin, the final instalment, just blew me away.

Tide Child Trilogy

RJ Barker’s The Bone Ships won a well-deserved Best Fantasy Novel at the British Fantasy Awards 2020, and if you like epic fantasy or adventures on the high seas get on it forthwith. The world, the characters and the story were so well-described as to be fully real in my mind. Book two, Call of the Bone Ships, and book three The Bone Ship’s Wake are as good or better. The end of the trilogy had me in floods of tears (and seems to have had the same effect on most readers on Twitter) — you don’t get that if you haven’t been drawn into the world and made to feel like it all matters. Oh, and the author’s from West Yorkshire, though you’d never guess from this trilogy (we are a land-locked county).

The Bone Ships by RJ Barker

CJ Cherryh

I had never heard of CJ Cherryh when I spotted half a shelf of her novels in a local charity shop in 2010, despite her having been publishing since 1976 and winning various awards since the 80s. I read the back of a few and bought them, and every time I’ve run across another I’ve bought that too. Some are what you might call sci-fi and others are what you might call fantasy but honestly they’re all good. I’ve only reviewed one, which was the 1995 novel Rider at the Gate, kind of a western on a frontier planet:

Rider at the Gate by CJ Cherryh

The distinctly odd ones

I can’t believe I didn’t include Finch by Jeff VanderMeer in the SF crime round-up. It starts with Finch trying to solve a murder, in a city under occupation by what are essentially walking mushrooms. It’s one of the most brilliant SF noir I’ve ever read. I can also highly recommend his more recent novel Borne, which I never reviewed — it’s set in a different world, you don’t need to read one to read the other.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

You may know Cory Doctorow as the recent coiner of the term ‘enshittification’ to describe the typical arc of online services. However, he is a Canadian SF author and I enjoyed his 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town when I read it in 2017. There’s a free e-book available if you want to check it out — Doctorow is a great believer in Creative Commons. On one level the novel is an urban fantasy set in Toronto in the early 2000s, and I could still remember enough of my 2-week visit in summer 1998 to be able to picture the neighbourhoods. However, the main character’s parents are a mountain and a washing machine, and you have to enjoy a particular type of oddness to appreciate this one.

Quick ones to end on

Brasyl by Ian McDonald had an interesting structure, within each chapter there were three sections set in 1732, 2006 and 2032 respectively, in three different parts of Brazil. It had slavery (of different types), stratified societies, football, religion, and quantum mechanics running through everything, and I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who likes both historical fiction and SF; most of the 1732 strand reads as straight historical fiction. The book was peppered with non-English words and phrases, which added a flavour of Brazil but not everything was translated in the glossary at the end. The more I read, the more I realised how little I know about Brazil; I had no idea if historical events or people were real or not. I spent a while on Google maps dashing about the country though, so maybe I learnt something. I love a book that makes me go find out more in some way.

Jodi Taylor writes deceptively simple fantasy novels that you can reliably turn to. In The Chronicles of St Mary’s we follow Max (Dr Maxwell) as she does historical research in contemporary time – don’t call her a time-traveller. Someone will probably die, others will be in deadly peril, they’ll visit some famous moments in history, and Max will be inappropriately flippant. It’s usually an enjoyable romp with heart-wrenching moments. I’ve read the first seven novels, which seemed like a reasonably self-contained story arc. There are short stories available too and she writes other related strands, a bit like Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures are to Doctor Who.

In 2020 my other half and I listened to the audiobook of Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. A standalone novel, this is set in an alternative Wales where Tom Jones is still known for Delilah, but most humans hibernate every winter to avoid the arctic conditions. Nothing is quite as it seems, and poor Charlie Worthing’s about to get caught up in a winter nobody wants to experience, least of all him. The level of detailed imaginative brilliance was breathtaking but the reading by Thomas Hunt gave it an extra dimension and I’m glad I listened to the audiobook from the library (so we could both ‘read’ it at once) rather than read the book.

The Interminables by Paige Orwin is a 2016 debut from Angry Robot with a sequel available. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic 2020, which seemed too fitting when I read it in the first lockdown! It’s also one of the most compelling and original fantasies I’ve read in a long time. The east coast of the USA is ruled by wizards (not the pointy-hat and wand variety, more like technocrats of a particular type) attempting to keep the fragile peace intact. The central partnership consists of a ghost and a jazz-loving near-immortal from the 1940s, and they need to investigate an arms-smuggling ring. Of course it’s never that simple, and there are secrets and lies aplenty, and I was on the edge of my seat for ages.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny is an odd (Hugo-winning) sci-fi novel from 1967. It’s set on a planet where the technologically-advanced have set themselves up as Hindu deities in a pseudo-heaven, while the masses toil and worship. Buddha, or Sam as he’s known to his friends, finds it tiresome and devotes his life (or lives) to disrupting the status quo. It’s not an easy read, not least because the chronology is not straightforward (I think Chapter 1 happens later than the next few chapters), and if you don’t have a passing familiarity with Hinduism and/or Buddhism I’d say you’re going to get confused more than once. It is ultimately a good and thought-provoking novel, however, so if that doesn’t put you off I’d give it a try.

I read a Guardian article about non-Eurocentric fantasy novels, which added a few books to my To Read list, two of which I read towards the end of 2022. The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard mainly involves fallen angels in an alternative Paris; they live in rival Houses and there are long-running intrigues and complex goings-on, lots of celestial politics behind the scenes. However, one of the characters caught up in the events of the novel is originally from Vietnam and has a whole different framework of magic and religion to draw on, which brings a different perspective. The other one was The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and good grief it’s good. It’s about the end of the world, but beyond that there’s not much to say without spoilers. I loved the conversational narrative voice, the fact that one strand is written in second person, the way the world feels whole and different (like Dune or similar). It’s the start of The Broken Earth trilogy which is breathtaking. Just read it if you like epic fantasy, you’ll thank me later.

I hope you’ve found a book or author to explore. Let me know in the comments or by replying to the email⁴.

Finally, here’s a five-minute timeslip drama of mine for you to listen to — you’ve done a lot of reading already so let’s give your eyes a rest. It’s called Playing With My Heart and it was a winner of the Script Yorkshire radio drama competition 2020, professionally produced for Chapel FM in 2022.

1. I didn’t just say that. This is a set of book reviews, after all.

2. I don’t even know if some of those are made up or if they’re all real categories

3. It’s the second time I’ve mentioned that novel but I don’t seem to have reviewed it anywhere. I remember it as being good though, set in 1940s England.

4. I really do mean it when I say things like that — please help me feel like I’m not just typing into the void